ASR

healthtech

WER Isn’t Enough: Rethinking ASR Safety in Clinical Care

Voice tech is entering the clinic—but we still judge automatic speech recognition (ASR) mainly by Word Error Rate (WER). That score can’t tell you if a mistake is harmless or could change a care plan. * What they did: Clinicians compared ground-truth and ASR transcripts from real doctor–patient

ASR

WER is Unaware: Why Typical ASR Scores Can Risk Patient Safety

Not all transcription mistakes are equal. In clinic visits, the go-to score Word Error Rate (WER) can look fine even when errors change care-critical meaning. * Expert clinicians compared true utterances with ASR transcripts in two doctor-patient datasets, labeling the impact: No, Minimal, or Significant. * WER and many other metrics poorly